WHERE HAS “REAL” NATURE GONE, ANYWAY?: ECOCRITICISM

18 Pages·2013·0.15 MB·English

WHERE HAS “REAL” NATURE GONE, ANYWAY?:
ECOCRITICISM, CANADIAN WRITING
AND THE LURES OF THE VIRTUAL*
Eva Darias Beautell
Universidad de La Laguna
ABSTRACT
This essay offers an approach to ecocriticism in the context of contemporary English Cana-
dian literature and culture. It analyzes definitions of the national identity in the past three
decades in connection with Canada’s real and/or imaginary wilderness. Following a period
of dismantlement of such associations, a period characterized by the rise of a fundamentally
urban multiculturalism in Canadian literature, the ascent of ecocriticism in the 1990s might
be interpreted as a conservative move towards the recuperation of the unified national
metaphor the country’s association with the wilderness seemed to provide. But, is there
anything Canadian about ecocriticism? What could Canadian writers and critics contrib-
ute to it? To answer these questions, the essay will scrutinize various moments of the meta-
phor in criticism and fiction, along with changing concepts, in the age of technology, of
nature and of our relation to it.
KEY WORDS: Ecocriticism, Canadian literature, nation, wilderness, technology, feminism,
post-colonialism, aboriginal writing.
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RESUMEN ?...
Y
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Este ensayo ofrece un acercamiento a la ecocrítica en el contexto de la literatura y la cultura W
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anglocanadiense contemporánea. Analiza las distintas definiciones de la identidad nacional N
A
en las últimas tres décadas en conexión con la naturaleza canadiense real o figurada. Des- E,
N
pués de un período de desmantelamiento de estas asociaciones, período caracterizado por el O
auge de un multiculturalismo fundamentalmente urbano, la aparición de la ecocrítica en E G
los años 90 pudiera ser interpretada como una reacción conservadora para recuperar la R
U
metáfora de unidad nacional que la naturaleza proporcionaba. Pero, ¿hay algo intrínseca- AT
N
mente canadiense en la ecocrítica? ¿Cuál sería la contribución de escritores y críticos cana- L”
dienses al campo? Para responder a estas preguntas, el ensayo escruta varios momentos en el EA
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uso de la metáfora en la producción crítica y creativa, frente a conceptos cambiantes sobre S “
el medio natural y nuestra propia relación con él en la era de la tecnología. A
H
PALABRAS CLAVE: Ecocrítica, literatura canadiense, nación, naturaleza, tecnología, feminis- RE
E
mo, post-colonialismo, escritura aborigen. H
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REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES, 56; April 2008, pp. 81-98
06 Eva Darias Beautell.pmd 81 16/04/2008, 13:53
In his interesting essay, “Beyond Nature/Writing: Virtual Lanscapes Online,
in Print, and in ‘Real Life,’” H. Lewis Ulman discusses the limits between the real
and the virtual dimensions of contemporary life, presenting a challenging view of
the real as virtual, and arguing against the common perception of virtual reality as
a threat to real reality. Drawing on Braudillard’s notions of hyper-reality, Ulman
argues that VR is increasingly becoming part of our daily life to the point of defin-
ing our contemporary experience of it. Moreover, the transformation of the physi-
cal world into a virtual one has been for long a common practice of any culture:
“After all,” he writes, “belief in magic has in many cultures and times transformed
the natural world into a magical place, occupied by the real (that is, material)
talismans and (to those outside the belief system) imaginary presences” (344). This
view, Ulman continues, has important implications for ecocriticism, since tech-
nology
behooves us to discover what imaginative and conceptual resources we need to
construct ethical and healthy relationships between digital and material worlds,
just as ecocritics have been working to establish such relationships between tex-
tual and material worlds. Indeed, the blurring and interanimation of symbolic
and material worlds raises important questions for ecocriticism [...]. How do our
experiences of material landscapes inform our experiences of symbolic landscapes
—and vice versa? How do we distinguish virtual landscapes from real ones and
establish ethical relationships in or to both? In sum, how can our symbolic appro-
ximations of the material world help us sustain relationships to that world that
avoid disastrous or oppressive consequences for ourselves and the other species
with which we live?” (Ulman 345)
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By explicitly connecting the discourses of technology and ecology, Ulman
LL is dismantling radical ecology’s typical claim to material reality, and therefore to the
E
UT authenticity of experience, as well as probing technology’s frequent association with
A
E virtuality, and thus with a second-order dimension of experience. This conscious
B
S blending of ontological categories seems especially relevant in the case of Canadian
A
RI literature and culture, where definitions of the national identity in the 1970s were
A
D
A often attempted in connection with Canada’s real and/or imaginary wilderness.
V
E Following a period of dismantlement of such associations, a period characterized
by the rise of a fundamentally urban multiculturalism in Canadian literature, the
ascent of ecocriticism in the 1990s might be interpreted as a conservative move
towards the recuperation of the unified national metaphor the country’s association
with the wilderness seemed, at least for some, to provide.
Yet, given the universal tone of much ecocritical thinking, it soon became
unclear whether such an approach should retain a national focus. Or, in other
* This essay is partly the result of a larger research project funded by the Ministerio de
Educación y Ciencia (HUM2006-08288/FILO), to which I wish to express my most sincere grati-
tude.
06 Eva Darias Beautell.pmd 82 16/04/2008, 13:53
words, is there anything Canadian about ecocriticism? What could Canadian wri-
ters and critics contribute to it? On the one hand, it may be argued that the rise of
this critical school in Canada replicates the country’s conflictive relationship with
the United States. As Susie O’Brien has expressed, ecocriticism as such, despite (or
because of) its globalizing impetus, is an American invention. On the other, the
existence of a rich ecocritical tradition in Canada, which is in turn radically linked
to the national, cannot be underestimated or denied: “By exploring this conjunc-
tion in a comparative framework,” O’Brien argues, “it is possible to consider not
just why some nationalist mythologies nurture ecocritical thinking more effec-
tively than others, but also how the principles of ecocriticism might be adapted to
reflect the importance of cultural context” (18-19). The aim of this essay is to
analyze possible ways in which ecocriticism can provide a useful discourse to ad-
dress, read and interpret literature and culture in contemporary Canada. I will
scrutinize various moments of the wilderness as metaphor in criticism and fiction,
along with changing concepts, in the age of technology, of nature and of our
relation to it.
Twenty eight years have already gone since D.M.R. Bentley, in his famous
essay “A New Dimension: Notes on the Ecology of Canadian Poetry,” called for an
ecological approach to the national poetic forms and techniques which would
“cast into a new relief its fabled ‘mapleness’ and ‘mooseness,’ to demonstrate that
poetry written in Canada, like the flora and fauna (not to say the people) that have
migrated, survived, and evolved here, displays morphological qualities that are
both distinctively regional and distinctively Canadian” (Bentley 4). At the time,
such a proposal meant both a continuation of and a reaction against Northrop
Frye’s well-known construction of Canadianness in terms of the fear of the land- 3
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scape. It implied a continuation in that Bentley’s argument seemed to stress and
confirm the validity of the search for a national(ist) identity and to acknowledge ?...
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the centrality of the Canadian landscape in such a project. Like Frye’s notion of A
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the national identity, Bentley’s was based on an intrinsic connection between the Y
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country and its nature: the Canadian wilderness in a real, literal or material, sense. E, A
Most importantly, it acknowledged the great power of a mythical dimension of N
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Canadian nature, a dimension that has proved tremendously productive for the G
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national culture and literature and often more powerful than the real one: the R
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Canadian wilderness in a virtual, figurative or metaphorical, sense. A
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It is at that level of the virtual or metaphorical, where Frye’s well-known L”
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conclusion identifies “a tone of deep terror” in Canadian poetry’s recurrent repre- E
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sentations of nature, a fear which is not produced by the actual dangers and dis- S “
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comforts of the wilderness (of which there are, I am sure, many), but rather by the H
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poet’s emotional response to it, “a terror of the soul at something that these things R
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manifest” (1965, 830). And in this, Bentley’s call for an ecological approach to W
Canadian literature may have represented a radical break with the dominant dis-
course about the national, putting forward an altogether new relationship to the
Canadian wilderness based as much on confrontation and survival as on the possi-
bility of identification with the natural landscape. The central question was: How
do we define Canada other than as a country of “vast and empty spaces”? (Gorjup).
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In his search for alternative metaphors to approach the Canadian mind, yet with-
out losing sight of the real and metaphorical powers of Canadian nature, Bentley
may have initiated the discourse of ecocriticism in Canada. Preceding Bentley, al-
though often unacknowledged, were the works of very many Canadian writers who
did not contribute to create an image of Canadianness as either void of meaning or
filled with unknown threats. Following him, works by younger authors, and espe-
cially by women (Thomas, Marlatt, Michaels) and aboriginal peoples of Canada
(Armstrong, Brant, King, Robinson) are consciously writing against that tradition
in ways that escape the paradox (Gorjup). In fact, the 1980s marked the beginning
of a new Canadian production that clearly moved away from the strong nationalist
import and into international, transnational or even post-national arenas.1
Against hierarchical and oppositional models of relationship with nature,
then, critical, creative and theoretical alternatives have sprung in the past three
decades that point to a reconfiguration of the national literature. And in that
context, ecocriticism, a discourse that searches to break the anthropocentricism
leading to the commodification of nature, has become unquestionably promi-
nent. As an approach to literature, it would involve not only the study of the
representation of nature in literary works, but also the application of an ecological
perspective to literary studies.2 Additionally, ecocriticism can be located right at
the center of the discourse of sustainability that is becoming central to all disci-
plines, including politics and economics. Today, as Linda Hutcheon suggests (“Erup-
tions of Postmodernity”), Frye’s fear of nature has turned into a fear for nature,
and the literary and artistic production of contemporary Canada shows a high
degree of ecological concern, often enacting self-conscious discussion of environ-
4 mental issues and proposing different alternative ways towards nature. Finally, its
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advocacy of a spiritual approach to the environment has placed it in the fore-
LL ground of alternative forms of thinking both nature and literature other than as
E
UT resource. It is by definition a hybrid form of criticism and calls for high interdisci-
A
E plinarity.
B
S In the larger context, a number of difficulties, however, need to be ad-
A
ARI dressed. In the first place, one must admit that the question of methodology is still
D
A a soft point, and it is rather unclear whether ecocriticism should be associated with
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E a “unified, ecological field theory” for literature (Bentley 4), with identifiable inter-
pretative procedures and techniques. Most importantly, does ecocriticism imply, by
1 Yet, for some critics, the 1980s represent the end, rather than the beginning, of an era. In
his edition of Jack McClelland’s letters, Sam Solecki, for instance, regrets the post-nationalist mood
of the period and mourns for the nationalist impetus of the 1960s, which had by then become
“either a spent political force or had been co-opted by the feel-good North American multicultura-
lism” (260). From this perspective, Bentley’s proposal could also be interpreted as a conservative
move to rescue a dying nationalism from the rising multicultural force.
2 Many critics have recently demonstrated ways of thinking ecocritical practices other than
in purely thematic terms (see, for instance, Laurie Ricou, The Arbutus/Madrone Files and Salal).
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definition, a rejection of the post-structuralist tenets? Does it mark, as some critics
have argued, “the return of the referent”? These questions are of special interest in
Canada, where it was the irruption of postmodernism that finally brought its litera-
ture to (inter)national recognition (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern), and where
the most prominent instances of ecocritical writing in the country seem to embrace
postmodern indeterminacy and have often adopted a deconstructive tone (Atwood,
Oryx and Crake, Marlatt, Taken, Michaels, Fugitive Pieces). In looking at the possi-
ble encounters between ecological thinking and literary studies, Dominic Head
identifies an initial incompatibility between the principles of deep ecology (essen-
tialist by nature) and post-structuralism (with its anti-essentialist thrust). Head
concludes that ecocriticism “can intervene only in current debates about literary
studies through a direct response to the implications of postmodernity”. Yet this
happens at a price, for “such a response would seem to necessitate a compromise on
ecocentric values” (38). Head’s view, however, is based on a common but arguable
identification of postmodernism as complicit with environmental degradation in
its abandonment of the “real” and its exclusive focus on the textual, an argument to
which I wish to turn briefly.
The concept of “textual pollution” provides an interesting pivotal point to
discuss the possible associations between ecocriticism and postmodernity, since many
well-known ecocritics have accused the latter, and post-structuralism, of having
provoked it, with its tendency to textual narcissism (see, for instance, Buell, The
Future): “This aspect of semiotic excess,” writes Will Slocombe in this regard, “bur-
ies the real world under a pile of words” (493). Slocombe elaborates further:
To use a parallel from economics, the ‘referential’ market has been flooded by an 5
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unrestricted supply of symbols until all symbols are devalued: the distinction be-
tween sign and referent collapses into a rampant textuality that no longer signifies ?...
anything. This is ‘symbolic pollution’, not in the sense that the pollution is not Y
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real, but in the sense that it is very real and symbols cause it. (Slocombe 495)
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From that perspective, the assumption that ecocriticism is free from pro- E,
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ducing sign pollution seems as naïve as the belief in its unobtrusive access to es- O
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sence, authenticity, to the “real” thing. Ecocriticism’s self-claimed connection to E
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the real world, Slocombe maintains, T
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L”
fails to account for the fact that academic literary discourse —the practice of writ- A
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ing about texts— is always already a second-order image in Baudrillard’s terms, S “R
masking and ‘de-naturing’ a profound reality. Relating ecocritical literature to ‘so- A
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cially-constituted systems’, a recurring tenet of ecocriticism, therefore ignores the E
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fact that nature is itself reified within those social systems, and that ecocriticism is E
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merely another social (academic) system and merely another reification of nature. W
We do not access the truth through academic discourse; we merely theorize an-
other, better model of simulating it. (Slocombe 502)
There is no other way, that is, but the way of language. Besides, given its
undeniably interdisciplinary nature, ecocriticism could (and does) swiftly draw for
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its methods on other contemporary critical discourses. That is in fact the case in
Canada, where much ecocritical production is linked to theoretical discourses that,
although stemming from and exploiting the postmodern dissolution of the Carte-
sian subject, thus representing a challenge to anthropocentrism, intersect at the
same time with social movements which vindicate a revaluation of otherness, and
thus, at least implicitly, move towards biocentrism. Ecofeminism, seen as the con-
fluence of ecology and gender issues, occupies one of those positions. Ecological
postcolonialism, especially in these times of postcolonial “descent” (Slemon), and
particularly as it relates to aboriginal approaches to nature, represents another. They
make two of the various contesting grounds from which contemporary writers and
critics are exploring notions of nature and Canadianness.
That Northrop Frye’s construction of the national identity was fraught with
his own biased reading of Canadian poetry has been sufficiently discussed and well
argued by feminist and ecofeminist critics today. According to Diana Relke, for
instance, Frye’s almost total reliance on Canadian poetry by men, and particularly
on E.J. Pratt’s, marked by the poet’s harsh childhood in an isolated turn-of-the-
century Newfoundland village, determined his seminal theory of Canadian iden-
tity. “As a young man,” Relke notes,
Frye fell under the spell of Pratt’s work and regarded it as the sum of all that had
gone before it; as the years passed he also began to see it as the prophecy of all that
came later. However, Canadian poetry by women tended overwhelmingly to re-
fute Frye’s terrifying view of nature as “other” and irreconcilably opposed to hu-
man consciousness; hence the work of women poets either remained on the pe-
ripheries of Canadian myth criticism or was subjected to the imposition of this
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8 dualistic way of knowing nature. (Relke 25)
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EL A gender perspective of Canadian literature would have definitely revealed
T
U a different approach to nature and, therefore, alternative national myths. Relke’s
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B proposal consists of an archival exercise of looking back at the Canadian tradition
S
A with an open mind to rewrite it, searching for the rich ecological projection of the
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A works of such poets as Isabella Crawford, Dorothy Livesay, Phyllis Webb, and the
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A more contemporary Daphne Marlatt:
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E
In short, these poets offered intersubjective ways of seeing and knowing the world
and new ways of resolving the conflict that arises out of a perception of reality as
turning on an infinite series of hierarchically arranged oppositions, the most fun-
damental of which is the opposition between male and female and, by extension,
between culture and nature. In this way, these poets are the inheritors of a tradi-
tion that began with Crawford. (Relke 33)
In fiction, I would add, female writers in Canada from all regions and
backgrounds, from Marian Engel to Aritha van Herk, from Daphne Marlatt to
Kristjana Gunnars, from Gail Anderson-Dargatz to Eden Robinson, have repeat-
edly and very self-consciously undermined the oppositional, androcentric model of
the “Canadian imagination,” articulating, in its turn, a myriad of possible ways of
06 Eva Darias Beautell.pmd 86 16/04/2008, 13:53
thinking the (female) human as natural and in nature.3 This, however, does not
necessarily imply an uncritical celebration of “women in/as nature.” Most of the
writers I have mentioned seem aware of the dangers of feminist practices that ideal-
ize the natural/maternal connection, as well as of the possibility of inadvertently
reproducing patriarchal patterns of relationship with nature. It is interesting to
point out, in this context, how a novel such as Marian Engel’s Bear, initially cel-
ebrated by nationalist critics as paramount instance of such an identification be-
tween women (as the national subject) and the Canadian wilderness, is now rather
seen as conveying the very impossibility of such an ideal identification, since the
protagonist, Lou, and the bear ultimately fail to build a satisfactory relationship of
equality. Instead, a gender reversal of roles happens between them which ironically
replicates the abusive patriarchal/imperialist rapport to woman and nature: “He
served her. As long as she made her stool beside him in the morning, he was ready
whenever she spread her legs to him. He was rough and tender, assiduous, patient,
infinitely, it seemed to her, kind” (Engel 119).
Already in the 1980s, women writers and critics were rereading the initial
interpretations of Engel’s book, writing back with further ideas, footnoting and
opening the enigmatic novel up to different meanings about the foresaid relation-
ship between women and nature. A radical contribution to this debate, Aritha van
Herk’s No Fixed Address, for instance, plays a metafictional game by introducing a
woman and a bear in its plot. The novel follows the life of its protagonist, Arachne,
in her different phases of breaking with patriarchal structures/strictures of behav-
iour and thought. The argument moves from the social to the natural as Arachne
escapes from her urban existence and drives to a wilderness setting whose descrip-
tion resounds with a platonic identification between the female and the natural, 7
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and whose climax is found in the episode of the Wild Woman, a woman-shaped
stone “spread to infinite sky, to a prairie grassland’s suggestion of paradise, a woman ?...
Y
open-armed on the highest hill in that world” (van Herk 232). A
W
Everything seems to point out to a profound, unquestionable connection Y
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between the female protagonist and the wild landscape, explicitly symbolized by E, A
the woman-shaped stone. Yet the fusion is just momentary, Arachne moves on and N
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drives north until she disappears from the story, literally becoming the missing G
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subject of the novel’s four “notebooks.” With this radical ending, the novel breaks R
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not only the reader’s expectations about the above identification but also its under- A
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lying binarism. It is time, the novel seems to argue, to look for alternative ways of L”
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approaching female subjectivity in society, nature and beyond. E
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Ecofeminism may well represent one of those alternative options, and, in S “
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fact, the alliance between ecology and gender issues has proved to be one of the H
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3 The essays contained in the groundbreaking collection A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian
Women Writing, edited by Shirley Newman and Smaro Kamboureli, and published in 1986, repre-
sented such an incredible variety of feminist approaches to nature within the national literature.
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most fruitful in recent years, producing an important body of theory, criticism and
artistic practice aimed at dismantling the structures of (and the subtle complicities
between) imperialism, anthropocentrism and patriarchal thought (see Garrard 23-
27). In Canada, the recent publication of works such as This Elusive Land: Women
and the Canadian Environment (Hessing, Raglon and Sandilands) has set an incred-
ibly rich ground for the combined analysis of gender and the environment across a
wide range of disciplines and fields. As the editors affirm in their introduction:
In the midst of an environmentalist critique of resource exploitation and toxic
imperialism, then, feminists have an important role to play in issuing a reminder
about the complex gendered dimensions of Canadian environmental history, lit-
erature, and economics. An understanding of the complex and diverse relation-
ship between women and the natural environment will contribute to a deeper
understanding of the environmental challenges facing Canada. (Hessing, Raglon
and Sandilands xii-xiii)
Many contemporary texts by Canadian women contribute to this type of
research by scrutinizing the gendered dimensions of environmental history. Gail
Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning, for instance, a novel about the
life of a homestead family in the British Columbia interior during World War II,
probes to its very exhaustion the patriarchal approach to both women and nature in
pioneer societies as “‘resources’ for male exploitation, overused, undervalued, and
denied full subject status” (Hessing, Raglon and Sandilands xiii). The idea is clearly
expressed in the text through the character of the father, his view towards his wife,
daughter and farm animals. By warning his daughter to stay away from bulls and
8 male dogs at the time of menstruation, his animalization of the female body turns
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against himself and becomes a sign of his own wild uncontrollable impulses. But
L
EL the most graphic instance of the aggressiveness of his farming methods, as well as of
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U his reduction of the female species to the reproductive function, is to be found in
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B the painful episode leading to the death of the cow Gertrude, an episode, moreover,
S
A which illustrates well the environmental implications of misogyny, uncannily fore-
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A shadowing the risky manipulations of nature into which the meat industry has
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A entered today.4
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If the confluence between ecology and feminism promises to become a
productive field, so has the potentiality of a convergence between postcolonial and
ecological projects in the specific Canadian context been put forward with con-
vincing arguments (see, for instance, Hutcheon). On the one hand, an ecocentric
perspective on past and present forms of colonialism would push the traditional
4 For a more detailed analysis of these implications in Anderson-Dargatz’s novel, see my
essay “Blood Road Leads to Promise.” Additionally, a remarkable fictionalized account of such ma-
nipulations can be found in Ruth Ozeki’s My Years of Meat, a must-read for those of us interested in
the intersections between ecology, feminism and literature.
06 Eva Darias Beautell.pmd 88 16/04/2008, 13:53
postcolonial anthropocentrism to the consideration of often-ignored biocentric is-
sues. On the other, approaching ecocriticism from a postcolonial position would
introduce a much-needed cross-cultural understanding of environmental issues, as
well as undermine the potential neo-imperialist intention often hidden behind ecolo-
gy’s universalistic claims (Huggan). The sound success in the market of two rela-
tively recent Canadian novels, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001) and Barbara Gowdy’s
The White Bone (1998), may be symptomatic of the public acceptance of such a
biocentric turn in postcolonial studies. Set in India, in the Pacific Ocean, in the
African plains or in Canada, these novels directly aim at the anthropocentric sys-
tem of thought by introducing the narrative point of view of animals as the central
characters (Godwy) and/or as central plot-makers (Martel).5
Recent postcolonial-oriented research on aboriginal cultures has also con-
tested the traditional vision of Canadian literature, unveiling it as the mark of white
male anxiety about feeling constantly out of place in the new territory. Frye’s garri-
son mentality has been seen, in this context, as a metaphoric way of expressing the
white settler’s sense of alienation from the land, and probably, the sense of guilt
derived from it (see Francis 233). And in this issue, both Frye and Bentley, who
talks exclusively about imported and transplanted forms, display at least a telling
obliviousness, if not a clear bias against, the cultures that preceded them and that
had figured the wilderness before them. Today, we are gradually learning how the
different aboriginal cultures of Canada approached nature in their own terms. In
the metaphorical plane, traditionally unfamiliar with a Cartesian division of the
world between subject and object, or with the Enlightenment separation between
nature and culture, they have always lived by a holistic, pantheistic notion of life in
nature. In the material plane, the present debates about Canadian natural resources, 9
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about sustainability and the preservation of the environmental richness of the country
are not only economic debates, but have also become moral issues, especially after ?...
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the consideration of aboriginal demands for self-government and land rights A
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(Hutcheon, “Eruptions” 147). Y
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Whether they choose to represent the aboriginal subject in a perfect har- E, A
mony with nature, thus sometimes playing with and/or reproducing (white) stere- N
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otypes of aboriginality, or to figure the Canadian wilderness as a rich ground for G
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gothic possibilities, with which they write back to and rewrite the so-called R
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foundational myths, the number of First Nation writers who self-consciously in- A
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clude an ecocritical perspective in their work has always been outstanding. They are L”
A
“writers who, either through mythic, psychic, or geographic channels, have identi- E
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fied a landscape or environment as intrinsic to their own conceptualization of the S “
A
self” (Dreese 2002, 3). This process has to do with the external as well as with the H
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E
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5 Still, whether they are effective in their attempt to destabilize anthropocentrism, or rather
achieve a postcolonial-oriented revival of the fabulist genre could be a matter of discussion else-
where.
06 Eva Darias Beautell.pmd 89 16/04/2008, 13:53
internal, with the real and with the imaginary place. Accordingly, they “have initi-
ated a movement toward a form of literary decolonization and environmental aware-
ness in which the healing process involves remapping external and internal ter-
rains” (Dreese 21). Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (2000) is worth commenting at
some detail in what follows, since it offers a rich example not only of this alliance
between the literary and the environmental, but also of the possibilities presented
by transcending the Manichean conflict between Natives and colonizers and focus-
ing on a land-based transcultural approach to contemporary aboriginal identities.
“Eden Robinson is not writing back,” argues J.A. Wainwright in this sense, “but
on” (117).
On the one hand, with its analysis of gender relations within a small Haisla
community of the West Coast, this novel works from the local to the global to
reveal the extent to which women in traditional rural cultures have a privileged
knowledge of the natural environment they live in, since, as Carolyn Merchant has
explained:
As producers and reproducers of life, women in tribal and traditional cultures over
the centuries have had highly significant interactions with the environment. As
gatherers of food, fuel, and medicinal herbs; fabricators of clothing; planters, weed-
ers, and harvesters of horticultural crops; tenders of poultry; preparers and pre-
servers of food; and bearers and caretakers of young children, women’s intimate
knowledge of nature has helped to sustain life in every global human habitat.
(Merchant 16)
Through the character of the narrator’s grandmother, Ma-ma-oo, who
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9 teaches the narrator the secrets of wild berries, medicinal plants and oolichan grease,
the transmission of traditional knowledge seems guaranteed. Thimbleberries, Lisa
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E learns form her grandmother in her berry picking trips, come out a little later and
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A have a sharper smell than salmonberries, which have “[s]errated, raspberry-like leaves
E
B unfurled as the shoots became stalks, then bushes” (Robinson 76). On the other
S
A hand, Ma-ma-oo ancestral ecological knowledge lives side by side her addiction to
RI
DA popular North American TV serials, “The Young and the Restless,” “All My Chil-
VA dren” or “Dynasty,” the passing of botanical information or traditional cooking
E
tips often interspersed in the narration with comments on the televised plot:
“Lauren,” [Ma-ma-oo would] shout at the TV, “leave him, he’s no good for you!
Na’. What a crazy woman.”
“Mother,” Mick would say. “It’s only TV. Everyone’s stupid on TV.”
“I know. I know. Wah. She’s taking him back.” She shook her head sadly.
After picking out the bugs, leaves and twigs, Ma-ma-oo would transfer all the
berries to a clean bowl and mulch them all together. She added a few tablespoons
of oolichan grease, stirring all the time, then added a sprinkling of sugar. She’d
leave the bowl in the fridge for another hour to let the flavours meld and we’d
watch some more TV until the salmonberry stew was ready, then we’d go into the
kitchen and Ma-ma-oo would give me a little dessert bowl. We’d eat in respectful
silence, Ma-ma-oo closing her eyes in ecstasy as she ate. The grease makes the
06 Eva Darias Beautell.pmd 90 16/04/2008, 13:53